The Bible: What Really Happened, What Got Written, and Why
Reading the Bible we must separate 1) What history and archaeology show happened, 2) What got depicted in writing, and 3) Who wrote it that way, and why
There has been a flourish of growth over the past few centuries and even decades in our ability through linguistic methods to critically analyze sources and structures within the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible. We are also better able to reveal the layers of civilization, social order and disorder, and material culture and customs on which scripture is attendant through the methods and paradigms of modern archaeology. These developments are known to biblical scholars, and to those trained for religious leadership; they are largely unknown to the many adherents of biblical religions themselves.
This wealth of knowledge about scripture—the various sources and structures of its texts, and the times, material circumstances, and political interests under which they were compiled—has implications for how we understand scripture itself. A better contextual understanding of scripture enhances our understanding of its content. This is important for scripture to inform individual and collective spiritual growth going forward. This information needs to reach ordinary Christian congregants.
As an example, there are certainly relationships between the actual history of the Levant (eastern Mediterranean) and what is depicted in Hebrew scripture. But these have to be teased apart to properly understand their relationships. Understanding the immediate reasons for scriptural authorship and editing in creating depictions of past events is part of accurately handling and interpreting scripture.
By the second half of the seventh century BCE, stories that had been orally transmitted for centuries about the burning of some Canaanite cities that were vassals of Egypt during the so-called late Bronze Age ‘collapse’ in the twelfth century were developed into stories of a military conquest of Canaan by Israel, replete with seventh-century material and geographic details. These were compiled under the Deuteronomistic reforms of Josiah, king of Judah. What had actually happened is that nomadic herders who had been forced into a wave of settlement in the northern and southern highlands to do their own farming following the dissolution of the Bronze Age had forged distinct cultural identities among their Canaanite neighbors around dietary, non-intermarriage, and ritual surgical practices, with a possible influencing factor connected with the monotheistic Egypt of Pharaoh Akhenaten.
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The more populous and accessible north developed economically, while the south remained a hinterland that would eventually develop into the kingdom of Judah. Polytheistic worship of various gods or elohim in both areas eventually included the worship of YHVH. Some religious practices according to distinctive northern traditions, to which the people calling themselves Israelites were long accustomed, were eventually recast as evil in Judah to the south.
This was part of an attempt at political and cultural unification under the exclusive centralized worship of YHVH in Jerusalem. Canaanite, Israelite, and Judahite stories were combined and enhanced under the YHVHistic objectives of consolidation and unification. Accounts of chiefdoms in Jerusalem under the House of David in the tenth century were embellished into a golden age of united monarchy. This supported Judahn expansionist designs on the former territory of the kingdom of Israel during the decline of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the late seventh century.
So, the development of singular identities occurred as a matter of settlement and survival starting in the twelfth century. The ongoing development of oral histories into scripture was later used to support the specific aims of political and cultural unification and expansion in the seventh century. Continuing from there, consolidation and preservation of cultural heritage under dispossession became the aim of scriptural writing and redaction during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century. This was followed by the establishment of a relatively stable religious tradition from the late sixth century BCE into the first century CE.
With respect to Hebrew scripture, we must separate these three things from one another:
The actual material, political, and cultural history of the Levant.
History as it is depicted in scripture.
The circumstances under which those scriptural depictions were formulated.
We can then more accurately discern relationships between events, stories, and writing.
The same is true in principle for the history and scriptures of the Christian movement, under the boot of the Roman empire, under its patronage, and as a temporal empire in its own right. These are circumstances under which the scriptures and doctrines of Christianity were developed and must be understood. Knowing how and why scriptural stories and church doctrines came together in the way they did can put them into perspective as a spiritual history of Jewish and Christian peoples, one that has the power to inform our spiritual formation even today.